EVE General Discussion

And you cannot say what that "one thing" is? Then you guys wonder why youre the example on how not to communicate..

You could prbably apply any of the 'talking point' slide shows from the FFs and go down the list of things talked about but never implemented. One of the major presentation at FF2009 had a bunch of things that drew cheers, but have never been talked about since. I remember things like "fleet formations" being discussed.

Basically, if anyone with authority shows you a list of 30 things they plan to implement...expect ~2-3 to make it to TQ....eventually.

CCP is the home of big dreams and small updates.

They're like a man treading water in the ocean...reaching for the moon to keep him afloat.

So true.

C.

Hopefully that is changing.

Are you trolling? Sure seems like it.

I hate WoW and I really think that it's a useless game but.. to compare wormholes to lets say the latest expansion in WoW which overhauled the whole game, or the expansion before that which added an entire continent which was built from scratch is just pathetic.

Maybe you're easy to fool but.. in reality wormholes are just regular stargates with a different graphic. They lead to regular solarsystems that can easily be generated containing roid belts and planets just like any other system. Nothing new there. Oh and there's sleepers. Sleeper AI isn't really breaking new grounds in the field of AI though so, again, nothing new there.

Take Marauders or Black ops.. Instead of making brand new models for these new ships they just took old models and added new skins. Boring!

Take planetary interaction.. another feature that most likely didn't take an overwhelming amount of time to make considering how simple it is to use and how basic the graphics are, looks more like something from addictinggames.com rather than something serious.

A real expansion would be more like adding Jove or re-opening the EVE gate with a whole new world to explore, new ships new missions, new implants. Do you know why EVE's expansions are for free? Because to call them expansions is to stretch it a bit too far. It's more like a patch / major patch.

To call something an expansion would be like rolling back to Red Moon Rising in 2005 and then add titans, supercarriers, planetary interaction and wormholes and perhaps even the Carbon engine all at once. That's the minimum you need to include in an expansion if you're going to call it an expansion.

I love EVE, I just hate that it takes 10 years to actually ADD something to the game that isn't a shiny new button.

When you want to compare EVE's expansions to other games, then this.

But then again CCP doesn't have the tens of hundreds of employees blizzard has and billions of employees SOE has. And besides, EVE expansions are free so you can say that those companies can dump huge amounts of money on their expansions and have all that investment return upon launch since everyone has to pay for them.


Games like the ones you mentioned need those expansions because the end-game gets stale after a while. There is nothing else to do. EVE doesn't have and doesnt need an endgame so if CCP would scrap the 2 expansions a year and replace it with 1 big expansion and 1 big "patch" (like the one this winter) i'd be happier.

So.. Just because EVE's endgame is less stale than other games means that we don't need real expansions?

I'd say real expansions plus the amount of content we're already getting would be the most optimal choice.

What about the proposed treaty system that got axed for the Dominion expansion two years ago?

Hey!

That's a nice list of questions and I'll try to address them the best I can. I hope you've been noticing the stream of dev blogs coming out recently and as should be apparent, some of our previous plans have been re-arranged in favor of new plans. That affects some of the items on the list but let's just go through it:

Establishments - A blog about the future of Incarna is being worked on. I can't say more right now but I assure you that we will be sharing everything with you as soon as we have all the pieces in place. I'm personally looking forward to talking about all that.

New background/Nebulae - This is being worked on as we speak, I can tell you that much. It's another one of those things where it's hard for us to name a date because so many of our plans have been shifted and not all the pieces have fallen into place yet, but again...expect news sooner than later.

Ship skins/Corp logos on ships - This is one of the features the community team has championed, and which is in our pipes, but getting it into the game is reliant on art tech that's being worked on for the winter expansion. I have hopes it won't be long until we see either, or both, but it's not my claim to make. I'll keep an eye on the progress and aim to get you news as soon as we have something concrete to report.

PI iteration - Funny you should ask that because we just published a dev blog about the next iteration earlier today. Coming in the winter expansion (Zulu's blog warned we might add stuff to the list ;) )

Tech 3 frigs - Will not be coming in this winter expansion at least. But we still want to do them! No set place for them in our plans right now that I know of at least (which means there probably isn't). But let's cross our fingers for sometime next year.

Planetary ring and comet mining - Same as tech 3 frigs. No set place in the plans at this time. But we are going to be making some fun adjustments to mining. We'll probably have news on that before the winter expansion.

Player based contraband system - As you mentioned, Incarna/establishment plans have changed and this was part of that plan...this is something we are still interested in doing but we will have to see where it gets slotted in now that plans have been changed. And as I said earlier...the future of Incarna will be explained in the near future.

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I apologize if there's not a whole lot of meat in those replies, but most of these things are either in a state of uncertainty at this time, or need to be properly covered in a dev blog when key details are in place. I hope that this sort of "bridging of the information gap" helps a little though.

Thanks for the response, I appreciate that it must be difficult to be definitive in cases like these. I do read every blog and stalk dev posts on the forums since the new forums made that easy. Because, well, I stalk EVE devs for fun.

I would however like to repeat the sentiment that I think many players would appreciate periodic updates on the status of features that are taking a long time to see completion or even to go into active production. The ship design competition (Tornado) is an excellent example that wasn't on my list. Players want to know if 'feature X' is on the way, delayed for unspecified amount of time due to 'reason Y' or reluctantly scrapped because it didn't hold water in the design phase.

It gets annoying for players to hear about a great idea only for it to vanish and not know why. I think it would be a good step for the community team to publish a round-up blog that gives a simple summary of items as you have done here. It doesn't need to be highly specific or come with pics of shiney new features, it just needs to keep players in the loop and show that CCP hasn't forgotten about this cool stuff.

Cool stuff like....this?